Television and motion picture tie-in books are always a gamble. Sometimes they're written on the cheap by newcomers (talented or not), and sometimes hard-working pros (like the late, great Stuart M. Kaminsky) make them a delight... or a disappointment.

I'm happy to report that Heat Wave by “Richard Castle” is not only a superior effort among tie-in books, but one of the most enjoyable mysteries I've read this year. On top of that, it gave me a subjective reader's experience I've never had before (which I'll explain further along).

One warning—the paperback version has the smallest print I've seen in a novel in years. If you're over 50, you'll need your bifocals for this one.

For those unfamiliar with the joke, “Richard Castle” is the hero of an ABC television series, “Castle,” in which he's portrayed by the charismatic actor Nathan Fillion. Castle is a bestselling author who exerts personal leverage to get permission to follow around a New York detective squad led by Det. Kate Beckett (played by the beautiful Stana Katic). Castle falls in love with Beckett, who is attracted but keeps him at an arm's length. He makes her the heroine (thinly disguised under the name “Nikki Heat”) of a novel called Heat Wave. That book (we are invited to believe) is the one we are reading here. Read the rest of this entry . . .

The synopsis on Terribly Happy's Amazon page suggests that it's a black comedy. I know I take a risk in disputing that categorization, but on the other hand I actually understand some of the dialogue behind the subtitles (which are excellently translated, by the by), and I say no, it's not a comedy. It's a cross between a western and a noir.

The style of this Danish film is pretty close to a western. It has the look both of traditional westerns and the Italian variety, and the opening is archetypal horse opera (without the horses). The new marshal (Robert Hansen, played by Jakob Cedergren) arrives in town (the subtitle people insist on translating lensman as marshal. It's more like constable, but I understand their reasons). He is tall and lean and sad-faced, like Will Kane from High Noon. He harbors a secret, a bad thing he did that got him reassigned from Copenhagen to this moribund community in the midst of the flat fields and bogs of southern Jutland. The locals don't cotton to him from the start. “We have our own ways of handling things,” they tell him. “If we have a problem, it goes out to the Bog.”

But the form of the film is Film Noir. From the very beginning, Robert is faced with a series of dilemmas, choices in how to deal with various infractions of the law, and he almost always takes the line of least resistance in handling them. This leads, seemingly inevitably (but not really; the filmmakers pull a couple fast ones) to increasingly horrific mistakes. Most of these mistakes center on the Buhl family, a living domestic nightmare. Ingerlise Buhl (Lene Maria Christensen) is an attractive, seductive woman who complains frequently of being beaten by her husband (thuggish urban cowboy Jørgen, played by Kim Bodnia), but is never willing to follow through with a formal complaint. Local gossip says that when their little girl Dorthe (Mathilda Maack) walks the streets with her doll carriage, Jørgen is beating Ingerlise—but Robert never actually sees or hears it happen.

And that's before it starts getting bad.

Some people think that noir film is amoral, but I think the secret of the best noir is that it's hyper-moral. No sin goes unpunished. What noir films lack is grace. The god of noir is a jealous god (in an ironic touch, a large needlepoint hangs over the door in a crime scene, with the verse, “Gud Er Kjærlighet” [God is Love]).

A particularly interesting element of Terribly Happy is the local pastor, played by Henrik Lykkegaard. It's not a big part—his longest speech is a homily at a funeral, possibly the worst funeral sermon in human history. What interests me is that the man seems to have no gospel in his inventory. He is part of the local system, a system based on an eye for an eye. Robert's sins may be covered up and overlooked, but the only salvation left to him in the end is to find as comfortable a personal hell as possible.

Or maybe it is a comedy, and I just didn't get it.

Interesting movie. Not for kids.

I recently finished P.D. James’ The Murder Room (2003) beautifully read by Charles Keating. It is a straight-forward detective novel with enjoyable depth, but not really twists and turns. I see The Complete Review has reviewed it more, um, completely than I plan to here.

The story reveals the three siblings who are trustees of a small, unique museum named Dupayne in the London area opposing each other on whether to sign a new lease and allow the unprofitable museum to continue. Several others associated with the museum are walking around, and, of course, someone gets torched. No, it isn’t an accident, even though some characters want to believe it was suicide.

As I listened, I kept thinking about how the second murder yet to come would change the way I interpreted the details. I thought two or three people could have murder the first person, having motive and opportunity, but why would they kill someone else? I didn’t figure it out ahead of time.

I wonder if James’ mysteries have more to offer in the side trails than on the main road. The Murder Room has a warm chapter with the two of the detectives interviewing one of the fringe couples out of routine. It was a young couple with a baby, the husband being connected to a Paul Nash painting in the Dupayne museum. James’ choice of words in this chapter impressed me as geared toward highlighting the life of the child and this poor couple. They had very little, but they were tied to the past by the husband’s father and grandfather’s interest in that painting, and somehow it seeded hope for them. More so, some words appear to be inspire the reader to reflect on what is being aborted when that ugly choice is made.

Detective Inspector Kate Miskin’s wrestling with British class conflicts and arguments about the nature of girl’s education enrich the story as well.

Anyone with an interest in the Vikings knows of the island and monastery of Lindisfarne. The start of the Viking Age is generally dated to 793, when a devastating and unanticipated raid from Scandinavia brought about its sacking. After centuries as a place of sanctuary, the island became from that day on a target, getting hit again and again by plunder-hungry Northmen. In 875 the entire Lindisfarne community, monks, priests, and lay folk, packed up the monastery treasures, including the remains of Saint Cuthbert and a holy book (thought to be the Lindisfarne Gospels), and set off to find a safer place.

They wandered the land like the children of Israel until 882, when a new monastery site was found (it was relocated to Durham some time after).

Bearing the Saint by Donna Farley is a young adult novel dramatizing the adventures and sufferings of that company during its period of homelessness. As the story begins, the hero, a boy named Edmund, is mourning the loss at sea of his fisherman father. Soon he has much more to worry about as he becomes part of the exodus. Over the years that follow he grows up, becomes one of the bishop’s official “saint bearers,” suffers hunger and exposure, has adventures, falls in love, and comes to terms with Danish rule in Northumberland.

I found the book’s pace a little leisurely for my taste. It was episodic, but that’s the nature of this kind of story, so I can’t call that a criticism. The narrative engaged me, but I wouldn’t call it compelling. It did educate me on an aspect of the history of the Danelaw with which I hadn’t been much familiar.

The book is published by Conciliar Press, an Orthodox publisher, and was sent to me by an Orthodox friend. Considering that fact, along with the monastic elements of the story, I would have expected there to be a lot more promotion of monasticism in it than there is. In fact, none of the main characters becomes a monk or a nun in the course of the story, which surprised me. Evangelical readers won't find the sacramental aspects offensive, I think (unless the idea of saints' miracles offends them).

I’d say Bearing the Saint is a good, wholesome book that might be especially useful to homeschooling parents who want to teach their children some history.

Here's a remarkably fine, distinctive film, the victim of criminally bad distribution, which ought to be better known.

In 1933 Novalyne Price, a young schoolteacher and aspiring writer in Cross Plains, Texas, met the most famous man in town, the pulp magazine writer (and creator of Conan the Barbarian), Robert E. Howard. They liked each other, and Novalyne wanted to learn about writing, so they dated for a time (she was his only known girlfriend). Eventually they broke up due to Howard's volatile personality. In 1936 she went to college in Louisiana and never saw him again. He committed suicide that same year.

But thankfully for fans and scholars, Novalyne had taken up the Boswell-like discipline of writing down conversations she overheard or participated in, including those she had with Howard. She kept these journals for many years.

In the 1970s and '80s, after Howard had been rediscovered by fans and critics alike, she grew irritated with the amount of armchair psychoanalysis that was being done on her old friend. She organized her journals into a memoir called The Man Who Walked Alone, which came to the attention of filmmaker Dan Ireland. And so the movie The Whole Wide World came to be. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Edna at My Favorite Things reviews West Oversea.

Oh shoot, why not post a picture of the cover?

Fantasy author Brandon Barr reviews my West Oversea at his blog, here.

He says nice things.

I've been in contact with Brandon in the past, but I have to admit I haven't read either of his co-authored books. I must remedy this. He is clearly a man of taste and discernment.

It’s a mark of my monumental self-absorption that I make so bold as to review the wonderful USA Network series, “Burn Notice” (thanks to S.T. Karnick of The American Culture for bringing it to my attention), since I’m too cheap to pay for cable, and all of you probably knew about it long before I did. But I’m watching the DVDs now on my Netflix account, and I’m so enthusiastic I’ve got to say something. Quite a lot, actually.

The premise of “Burn Notice” is that the hero, Michael Westen (played by Jeffrey Donovan), is a spy who has come under suspicion in the agency, and so has been “burned”—that is, dumped in a city, with no money, credit, or legal identity, so to speak marooned.

Fortunately, he’s burned in Miami, his old home town, where he has considerable human resources Read the rest of this entry . . .

"Floyd R. Turbo" at Threedonia blog reviews West Oversea, in flattering terms.

A while back I reviewed Dick Francis' mystery, Decider, and said I'd be reading more. So I picked up the collection Triple Crown (comprising Dead Cert, Nerve, and For Kicks) and read it last week. It was an intriguing reading experience for me.

I have a hard time pinning down what's so compelling in a Dick Francis mystery. Most of the stories revolve around the sport of racing (with the corruption that racetrack betting invites), and that's a field of endeavor in which I've never had much interest (though I'll admit that if I have to watch a horse race, I'd prefer a steeplechase, which is the kind of racing Francis concentrates on, at least in the novels I've read). I can't say that he's a brilliant stylist—in fact I'd characterize him as the kind of author who disappears totally, which isn't a bad way to get your reader invested in your characters. I can't say he's especially skilled at crafting vivid characters. And yet I found myself horizontal on the couch for hours, turning page after page, absolutely under the spell of the stories.

Dead Cert, I understand, was Francis' first published novel. It's good, but I think he was still feeling his way. Nerve was his second book, and by then he'd already found his pace. This was possibly the most satisfying tale of revenge I've ever read. And For Kicks amazed me. It was the compelling adventure of a man who takes a dangerous job for money, endures great suffering and violence, and in the end learns something about himself that changes his life.

I think what I particularly like is that Francis writes about manly men. Men blessed, and burdened, with strength, integrity, and courage, Churchillian in their resolve never to give up.

What a joy to discover an author you didn't know before, who has a long list of published works you can look forward to!

Not a bad weekend, all in all. The storms did no damage to my house that I'm aware of. I'd planned on doing something constructive and diligent in terms of house maintenance, but wasn't able to manage it. On Sunday I gathered with other Sons of Norway members at Wabun Park in Minneapolis, and oddly enough it wasn't for anything having to do with Vikings (much). We had a picnic to celebrate the centennial of our district. Somebody had spoken vaguely of dressing in period for 1910, so I made an effort. I wore a white dress shirt with a tie, light-colored khaki trousers with suspenders (Y shaped. You've got to have the Y configuration). And I topped it off with my panama hat. I actually looked sort of like I might have come from the 1930s, if you didn't look too closely, but I made the effort. This paid off when somebody showed up with a 1913 Moline automobile, and I got to ride around in it a little because I was dressed right.

Sometimes—rarely--virtue is rewarded in this world.

Also watched the DVD of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey.

What shall I say about this very odd concoction? Read the rest of this entry . . .

It's not as hot and humid as when I stacked hay bales in the loft of my dad's barn back in 1960, but it's pretty stinking swampy out there. The weather forecast said 70% chance of thunderstorms this afternoon, but when I got home the sky was clear and blue, and I took my walk anyway. It rained this morning, and will likely rain again tonight, but for now the only moisture is suspended in the air, in molecule form, in high concentrations.

Last night I watched another new DVD acquisition, Robert Altman's “Popeye.” What a strange movie. Awful script. The songs are just an embarrassment. But the actors seem to be having fun playing cartoon games, and the visuals are great, and Robin Williams sings the Popeye song all the way through at the end. It always leaves me feeling better when I'm done with it.

A Norwegian relative wrote me years ago from a vacation in Malta, saying he'd toured the Sweet Haven set, which apparently is (or was at the time) still standing as a tourist attraction.

Speaking of DVDs, I'm on the cheap plan with Netflix now, and I'm taking the opportunity to view some of the cable series everybody's been raving about. This weekend I finished the final episode of “Rome.”

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It occurs to me, in thinking more about the film "Elling," that it's actually quite a pro-American movie.

As I mentioned, Elling, who has his doubts about the whole idea of freedom, is devoted to the Norwegian Liberal Party.

Later in the movie, the great symbol of freedom becomes a big American automobile.

I smell subtext.

So there's that.

It was probably inevitable I'd pick up the Academy Award-nominated comedy from 2001, “Elling,” sooner or later.

First of all, it's a Norwegian movie (English subtitles). Secondly, the name of the title character is a derivative of the old Viking name Erling, a name with which I have associations. And finally, it's about people with emotional disorders. I have some connections to that field of experience as well.

The Elling of the film is a middle-aged man who suffers from agoraphobia and fainting spells. He spent his early life living with his mother, and was placed in a mental institution after her death. While in the hospital he made one friend, a big, strong fellow named Kjell Bjarne (first and middle name; Scandinavians generally use both if they have them). Kjell Bjarne is obsessed with sex and extremely foul in his language (even in subtitles). However, as we soon learn, he's entirely innocent in terms of actual experience with women.

The two are set up in an Oslo apartment, on a trial basis, by the Norwegian social welfare system. If they can learn to function in the outside world, they are told, they'll be given greater freedom.

Elling isn't entirely sure he wants such freedom. Read the rest of this entry . . .

S. T. Karnick at The American Culture ably responds to Malcolm Gladwell's recent attack on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gladwell’s notion that To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960, is insufficiently hateful toward white Southerners and is unsophisticated in failing to embrace radical politics is a truly breathtaking instance of ignorant bigotry. It is also not original, and it is wrong.

Dark Light is another installment in Randy Wayne White's Doc Ford series. I was quite pleased with it. The author has positioned this series so as to let his marine biologist/covert ops agent hero play around in both the international thriller and the mystery genres. This one's a mystery, with the intriguing addition of a (possibly) supernatural element.

In the wake of a devastating hurricane that wreaked havoc on the economy and ecology of his Sanibel Island, Florida home, Ford gets drawn into a dispute between an acquaintance—an old fisherman he doesn't even like a whole lot—and a property developer. The developer, as it turns out, is not only a crooked businessman but a serial rapist and killer. Ford and his friends end up competing with the developer and his henchmen in the exploration and salvage of a World War II wreck. This attracts the interest of an enigmatic neighbor, an beautiful old woman who sometimes doesn't seem old at all, but is disturbingly seductive either way.

The supernatural element was what intrigued me most, fantasist that I am. Is the old woman the goddaughter of a famous beauty supposed to have drowned in the shipwreck, as she claims, or is she the woman herself, some sort of ghost?

Doc Ford and his friend Tomlinson are like the extreme poles famously described by Chesterton—one doesn't believe in God; the other believes in anything. Ford's unsettling experience with the mystery woman can be satisfactorily explained in purely materialistic terms. And yet, even Doc himself doesn't entirely believe that.

You used to see this sort of story more than you do now, I think. Stories framed as realistic, but with the door left open just a crack for other possibilities. I like such stories.

Dark Light was an engaging mystery, with a pleasant aftertaste. Cautions for language and adult situations.

Over the holiday, I read a couple more of Stephen J. Cannell's Shane Scully novels, Cold Hit and Three Shirt Deal. It would be pointless, I think, to give either of them full reviews, unless one of them was bad (neither is), since I'm already on record as enjoying the series. So I'll just post some thoughts, thought while reading.

1. Does the Los Angeles police department really allow an officer to be their spouse's immediate superior? If they do, I think they're nuts.

2. At one point in Cold Hit, Scully as narrator talks about the integration of female officers into the force. I thought the passage was interesting, because he listed good arguments the old guard used against deploying smaller, weaker female patrol officers. He largely answered them, not with a strong counter-argument, but by saying “It's done, there's nothing you can do about it.” I find that suggestive (in the inviting-of-thought sense). Probably it's just me.

3. In spite of his theoretical advocacy of a co-ed police force, Cannell makes heavy use of the inherent pressures, interpersonal and job-related, that come from men serving alongside women in dangerous situations. One could, if one wished, read the whole series as a subtle argument against female recruitment. Again, that's probably just me.

4. When I first picked up a Cannell novel, I didn't expect much in the way of character development. Cannell is a television writer/producer, and that medium isn't famous for the depth of its psychological insight (though The Rockford Files, one of Cannell's shows, featured some of the best character writing ever done in the medium). I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps as a relief from the constraints of the one-hour series, Cannell goes very deeply into the psyches of his characters. Indeed, in Cold Hit, he probably took it a little too far at one point, having a certain character make a personal disclosure worthy of Oprah's show, in the middle of a gun fight. But that's a rare misstep.

5. One drawback of the series format is that it's hard to allow the heroes to change as much as classic story structure demands. Cannell has done a wonderful job of solving that problem by making surprising changes in his hero's relationships, especially in Three Shirt Deal. What does Scully do when his wife/superior officer, previously the prudent one in the relationship, now becomes the crazy risk-taker, and he has to act like the grownup? The results are amusing.

Scott Nehring is a sometime film writer and current film critic, who blogs at GoodNewsFilmReviews.com. He is also a Christian, concerned about re-taking popular culture—if not necessarily for Christianity (in the sense of making every movie have a gospel message), but at least for the encouragement of positive movies that elevate people's lives.

You Are What You See (you can order it here, in electronic or softcover form) is his manifesto. (I need to mention that I received a free review copy.)

It would be easier to praise or pan his book if it had been the sort of thing I half-expected—either a call to “come out and be separate” from popular culture, or a point-by-point, guaranteed-or-your-money-back blueprint for cultural revolution. Instead, the author leaves a lot of room for individual decisions. Because freedom is part of the deal, and every Christian has his own gifts, strengths and weaknesses.

This is good. But it means the reader has to do a fair amount of work, forever asking himself “How does this apply to me, if at all?” “Where do I fit in the scheme of things?”

That, however, is the price of honesty and biblical fidelity. Read the rest of this entry . . .

For the record, I received a copy of Thomas M. Sipos’ comic horror novel Hollywood Witches by way of S. T. Karnick of the American Culture, for review purposes.

I love a good Hollywood story. The town’s like an old trollop with a million tales to tell, proud of her very corruption. Not for nothing is the Hollywood fable a traditional setting for morality tales (a triumph of hypocrisy in itself).

Thomas M. Sipos’ novel shows considerable promise and delivers a number of laughs, but gets weighed down by its lack of narrative discipline.

The chief eponymous witch of the story is Diana Däagen, a figure of satire, gargantuan in her vices and terrifying in her lack of self-awareness. A failed actress, she now works as “development executive” in a movie studio. She believes herself intensely spiritual and full of love for all humankind, but that doesn’t prevent her from treating her underlings like dirt, using black magic to thwart or kill her enemies, and planning to murder thousands of people at once—all for enlightened, politically correct purposes, of course.

There is no subtlety in Diana’s character. If you like characters in novels, even bad characters, to have sympathetic sides, you won’t find one here. Diana is pure black-hat witch, evil all through.

But of course she’s a Hollywood production executive, so that doesn’t strain credibility much. Read the rest of this entry . . .

The legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller seems to have risen in the Middle Ages, and is today considered entirely folklore. Possibly inspired by the story of Oedipus, it tells of a young man of noble family cursed to commit an appalling, shameful crime. As with Oedipus, his very efforts to make the crime impossible actually bring it about, but Christians added the element of redemption, a demonstration that no crime is beyond the mercy of God.

Author and clergyman Walter Wangerin Jr. has written Saint Julian, a version of the legend (published 2003) in his own dreamy, poetic style. It's not his best work, but it's worth reading for those with eyes to see.

Medieval Christians believed that Julian lived at the beginning of the Christian era, but Wangerin places it in the epoch that produced it—somewhere in the Middle Ages, apparently during the Crusades. His book combines the classic style of the hagiographical tale with the allegory of Pilgrim's Progress. Julian is a sort of Everyman, or Everychristian. Born to many advantages, blessed with physical beauty and rich natural gifts, he falls—almost innocently, one might say—into the sin of pride, seeing no need to curb his desires. His immoderation leads to a great sin, which brings upon him the curse of the tale. And when he commits his crime, it is again because of his intemperance. What follows is a long journey to discover the miracle of grace, a journey in which God is always guiding, generally unseen, along hard and painful roads.

Saint Julian lacks the emotional peaks and valleys that broke so many of our hearts in Wangerin's greatest novel, the delightful The Book of the Dun Cow. In his attempt to mimic the style of medieval chroniclers, the author starts the book slowly, and probably loses a lot of readers along the way. The very universality of his themes tends to make the characters one-dimensional, like figures in a Gothic church painting.

Fans of Wangerin will enjoy Saint Julian, but not consider it his finest work. Those new to him would do best to start with The Book of the Dun Cow.

Dean Koontz is a bold writer when it comes to experimenting with genres. In Relentless he gives us a comic horror science fiction thriller. It's a very enjoyable and compelling book, but I'm not entirely sure all its parts work together.

I've said in other reviews that I admire Koontz's general avoidance of the common (lazy) writer's trick of telling stories about writers. But Relentless is about a writer (and his family). It could hardly have been otherwise, given the premise.

If horror means basing plots on our greatest fears, there can be no greater horror premise for a writer than a sociopathic critic. Negative critics are the enemies against whom there is no defense. Fighting a critic is a loser's game. But how much worse if that critic wants you (and your family) dead? Read the rest of this entry . . .

Minnesota author John Sandford (real name John Camp) has established a nice little franchise with his Lucas Davenport Prey novels. Davenport is a Minnesota state cop who also happens to be a millionaire. He enjoys driving his Porsche fast with the siren on. As skillful as the character's handling of his car has been the author's own steering of the series, keeping out of both the left and the right ditches on a pretty winding road.

The early Davenport books portrayed a cop who was also a designer of computer games. He used the same skills he employed in game design to out-think the most devious and insane of criminals, and more than once he applied a little private justice in cases where he was confident the courts would let a dangerous killer back on the streets. In that period, Davenport seemed to be gradually losing his own grip on sanity, torn between duty to the job and his personal commitment to protecting the public.

Sandford deftly saved Davenport's sanity by having him meet and marry a female surgeon. As Davenport acquired not only a wife, but a foster daughter and a baby son, he grew happier and more stable. Unfortunately, he ran the risk of getting a little dull. The old edge seemed to be going.

With Wicked Prey, Sandford has found a solution to that problem too, bringing in another legal corner-cutter, close enough to Davenport to make his world perhaps even more dangerous and morally ambiguous than before. Read the rest of this entry . . .

You might think any kids who can excel in school would have a few fans cheering him on, but for many black students across the country, academic achievement is equivalent to community betrayal. “[Other students] feel they’re supposed to be cool, and cool is not supposed to be making good grades in school,” reports a Norfolk, Virginia newspaper article from 2006, quoting Courtney Smith, who became a journalism major at Norfolk State. She didn’t care that the other students said she thought she was white and better than them. She just wanted to excel, but what does “acting white” have to do with that?

This idea, that some black students believe they have better things to do than to study hard, is the subject of Stuart Buck’s book, Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation, released this week from Yale University Press. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, and studies back it up. The idea of “acting white” abounds within evenly integrated schools. Where students are mostly white or mostly black, Buck says they are more-or-less forced to get along, but in schools with black vs. white student ratios that are close to even, black students tend to define themselves against the academic achievers.

Buck’s presentation of the groupthink dynamic makes the book for me. It’s fascinating to read how group psychology can emerge wherever young people can be divided, regardless the meaning of the groups. Instinctively, people will favor their group over other groups, even when there’s no intrinsic strength in their group. It’s us vs. them, whoever they are. That’s the dynamic at play when black students accuse other black students of “acting white.” Humans are tribal, Buck observes, and homophily or friendship with those like you is strong within races and ethnicity groups. I think it’s fairly strong among political parties too. Read the rest of this entry . . .

At Evangelical Outpost, Rachel Motte reviews West Overesea.

I caught a few minutes of a BBC dramatization of one of the Kurt Wallander mysteries this season, but I was distracted and don’t even remember which story it was (it might even have been this one, the first novel of the series). Still, I’ve decided I need to acquaint myself with the booming Scandinavian mystery scene, and so I picked up Faceless Killers. I enjoyed it, with some reservations.

The hero is Detective Kurt Wallander, a policeman in the rural town of Ystad (pronounced EE-stad), Sweden. Wallander is no McGarrett, no supercop. He’s barely keeping it together, in his personal life and his profession. His wife recently left him, which spun him into depression and heavy drinking. His adult daughter simply disappeared from his life, though she makes occasional contact. His artist father is sliding into dementia. Meanwhile at work, it’s his bad luck to be the senior detective on the squad (his superior is on holiday) when an elderly farm couple is brutally murdered in their home. A whispered statement by the female victim suggests a “foreigner” was responsible. Somehow the word gets out, and there are reprisals against local refugee camps.

Wallander manages to do his job creditably, but sometimes it’s touch and go, thanks in particular to exhaustion and imprudent drinking. Leads are followed until they play out, and Wallander manages to get himself pretty severely beaten up more than once. There’s even an almost-comic car chase, in which Wallander follows a suspect driving a stolen car, in a commandeered horse van.

The story lost some steam toward the end, though I had no trouble sticking with it. As a conservative American, I had mixed responses to the ethos of the story. Wallander is surprisingly conservative (it seems to me) for a Swedish cop. Although heartily anti-racist, he has serious doubts about Sweden’s open borders policy, a sentiment which sat pretty well with me. On the other hand, as a typical Swedish civil servant, the idea of a right to bear arms is entirely foreign to his universe. I had a hard time, puritanical American that I am, swallowing his guilt-free pursuit of another man’s wife.

Still, it was an interesting story, and not quite what I expected. I may read more Henning Mankell.

A note on the translation—it could have been a lot better. The translator opted too often for literalism over idiom, and the story suffered for it. I need to get into the translation business. It would appear they need me.

In March of 2009, mystery author Stuart M. Kaminsky moved with his wife from his Sarasota home to St. Louis, Missouri, in order to wait for a liver transplant (he'd contracted hepatitis during service as a military medic in France in the late 1950s). Two days later he suffered a stroke, making him ineligible for the surgery, and he passed away the following October.

The online accounts of his death I've read give no hint how (or whether) Kaminsky's health affected his writing plans. But these last two novels in his Lew Fonesca series (my favorite of his four detective series) possess an elegiac quality, as if the author was tying up loose ends.

I've told you about Lew Fonesca before. He's a bald, skinny process server in Sarasota, Florida. During most of the series, he lives in the back room of his tiny office, next to a Dairy Queen. He gets around chiefly by bicycle. He doesn't want to own anything, and he doesn't want people in his life. He's chronically depressed, overcome by the death of his wife, in a hit-and-run accident in Chicago a few years back. He drove south until his car broke down in Sarasota, and settled where he stopped.

And yet he doesn't stay alone. Over the course of the books he acquires a staunch friend in the old cowboy Ames McKinney, who backs him up in tight spots. An old woman he once helped took in an unwed mother he rescued, and now he's sort of an unofficial godfather to the baby. He has a girlfriend. There's a “little brother” (who likes going around with him because shots tend to get fired). A therapist. And (in the final book) a Chinese man who sleeps on his floor, for reasons you'll have to read the novels to learn.

You might think these books would be depressing. They're not. In fact—it occurred to me while reading Bright Futures—they're actually rather funny. Lew Fonesca, like some farcical Job, is the butt of a cosmic joke. The God in whom he claims not to believe (he's a lapsed Episcopalian) seems to be playing games with him. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Once again, I offer something more in the line of a reading report than a book review, because (alas) the novel I've just finished reading isn't available in English.

My friend Baard Titlestad of Saga Publishers sent along a copy of Edvard Eikill's Lokes Lek, personally autographed for me by the author. I was fascinated and moved by what I read in its pages.

Lokes Lek (Loki's Game) isn't precisely a Viking book, but is set about a century after the death of Erling Skjalgsson, hero of my books. Indeed, Erling's descendents at Sola are part of the story.

When Norwegians look back at their history, they see a Golden Age beginning with the Viking raids, and ending with the death of King Sigurd Jorsalfar (the Crusader). King Sigurd did mighty deeds in the Mediterranean as a young man, then settled down to a peaceful joint rule with his brother Øystein the Good, one of the country's most beloved rulers. After Øystein's death, Sigurd ruled alone, sometimes heedlessly, but there was peace in the land and the people loved him. Read the rest of this entry . . .

It's been a couple weeks since I watched the movie Into Temptation, and I've been postponing writing about it, as one postpones making a routine dentist appointment, or flipping one's mattress. I feel about it as I do about some people—very nice people whose souls are in danger through loss of the content of their faith.

I first learned of Into Temptation because James Lileks' little girl is an extra in one of the scenes (it was filmed here in Minneapolis), and he wrote about it over at the Bleat. Then I read some very enthusiastic reviews somewhere online, and decided it was worth checking out. Short review: It was a nice movie. It was a well-made movie, featuring some fine performances. It was also heterodox, targeted to adherents of the Oprah wing of Christianity.

I'm surprised it didn't get wider distribution. It would seem to be the perfect film for mainline Christians. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I had the idea that I'd read about the film Ordetover at Big Hollywood, but a search of their archives shows that that isn't true. So I'm not sure where I learned about it, but I was impressed enough to place it in my Netflix cue.

Considered one of the masterpieces of one of the world's great directors, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet (The Word) is a movie that makes demands on the viewer (and not only because it's in Danish and subtitled). It's glacially slow by contemporary standards, and will shock many viewers with its treatment of subjects that, in our day, would only be handled in the cheesiest, low-budget Christian films. But I found myself increasingly engaged as the story went on, and was deeply moved by the end. Read the rest of this entry . . .

'It's an historian's duty to uncover, not to judge.' He lit his pipe. 'Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.'

This snippet of dialogue is delivered by one of the characters in the novel The Redbreast, by Jo Nesbø. I'm having trouble deciding exactly what to think about this book, but that passage seems to me about as close to a statement of the author's world view as I can find (I may, of course, be entirely mistaken). Nesbø seems to believe that moral choices are extremely important, but who's to say what the right ones are? Read the rest of this entry . . .